Best Friend
by TheDiiva
Summary: He paused at the bottom, turning a little back but not turning all the way around, "Because honestly? What I just went through was the most depressing thing I've ever had to endure."


Phanniemay15 Theme: Stories

 **Best Friend**

-o-oOo-o-

 _"I'm at a payphone trying to call home, all of my change I spent on you.  
Where have the times gone? Baby, it's all wrong, where are the plans we made for three?" -Payphone, Maroon 5_

-o-oOo-o-

Danny was used to coming home to seeing strange things in his living room. There was almost always a new invention scattered in pieces across the carpeted floor, or hundreds of pages of research his mother was sorting. At one time, there had even been sheets and sheets of metal when the portal was being constructed. But what he was confronted with right now was most certainly the most bizarre thing he could remember the room being cluttered by.

Boxes. Boxes and boxes of old, dusty stuff. He was secretly releived the Box Ghost was trapped within the thermos in his backpack. Boxes weren't unusual, but his dad sitting on the couch, surrounded by thick, three-ring binders _was_. Jack was slowly flipping through the plastic pages within, a small smile gracing his lips. Danny dropped his bag by the coffee table, trudging over.

"Hey dad," he said, his eyes tracing over the boxes, "What're you doing?"

"Oh, hey Danny!" Jack seemed to startle a little, but flashed his son a wide smile. Danny frowned a little, it didn't seem to be as enthusiastic as it normally was, "Just remembering the good ol' times."

"What...are these?" Danny gestured to the binders, tilting his head to read the cover of one, "'Awesome Prankitude'?"

Jack chuckled, and nodded, "Yeah. Vladdy and I used to have some wicked awesome pranks we'd do. Sometimes we'd have month-long prank wars between each other. Maddie would join sometimes, but mostly, it was just me and Vlad."

"I didn't know you had photo albums of your college days." Danny replied. Jack motioned for him to sit and Danny took the only free spot still left on the couch. He reached into his pocket for a moment, shifting his phones, then took his hand back out.

"I didn't know I did either. I thought we'd lost them when we moved into his house. I just found them in the garage." Jack said, and Danny nodded. The garage had always been a mess. Jack looked sadly at the page the album in his hands was open to, "Man, I forgot what Vlad looked like when he wasn't angry all the time..."

"Dad?"

"Here, look at this-" Jack perked up and grabbed another binder, setting the previous on the table. He flipped to the front, and pointed at one of the pictures. Danny leaned closer, fallowing the direction of the gloved finger, "This was the first day of college. I was going to go to Penn State, but I decided to go to Wisconsin University instead because Vlad was going there. We'd gone to high school together, so why should college have been any different? This was the first and _last_ time I ever got him into a tanktop."

Danny's brows shot towards his hairline. For good reason, he thought, since Vlad did not at all look good in a tank. He was much too skinny for the loose fabric, his shoulder nearly pointed. The two of them were somewhere in Wisconsin University, sitting on some steps. His dads trademark face-splitting grin was in place, but what shocked Danny was that Vlad was also smiling quite wide. His hair was braided into thick braids, longer than he remembered seeing it when he'd gone back in time. There was a light in Vlad's eyes that Danny had never seen before, and it looks so very foreign being there.

Jack shifted and turned a couple of pages before making a noise and pointing to a new picture. It depicted his mother trying to stop a large, tall test tube from overflowing with thick steaming, bubbling liquid. She seemed to be laughing about it, despite the fact that newspaper and tongs in her hands were doing nothing to help the situation. Jack was trying to knock the entire thing over, the mischievous smirk all the proof needed of that. Vlad, on the other had, was trying to hold Jack back from doing that, while also unsuccessfully trying to stay away from the erupting tube.

"This was the first experiment the three of us did—we met Mads in our science class. This pretty much set the record for how well things would go with our work—the two of us somehow making it go wrong and Vlad just trying to figure out _how_ he got roped into it." Jack explained, a slight amused tone lighting his voice that betrayed that he knew exactly how things 'somehow' went wrong.

Danny stared at the picture, pushing on his teeth with his tongue, "Seems to me that Vlad getting hurt was just a matter of time, if that was the case."

The amusement vanished from Jack's eyes instantly, and Danny regretted saying anything. He flipped to a new page, "Yeah...Doesn't change the fact that it shouldn't have happened, though."

Maddie was stood, her arms threw out to the side in a 'ta da' fashion, towards the horrifyingly large mountain of ice creme on the counter. Piled into a cake pan and topped with more toppings that Danny had ever seen on anything before, the desert was about a foot and a half tall. Jack was putting three cherries on every ice creme scoop. Vlad was nowhere to be seen, but Danny assume that was because he was taking the picture.

"This is what you get when you give college students about two hundred bucks during a weekend—the ultimate ice creme sundae. I kid you not, this thing was Vlad's idea. He and Mads couldn't stop arguing over how to put the syrup on." Jack chuckled, pointing to the picture below the first, "And this is what happened when Vlad lost. He took the cap off the bottle and dumped it over her head. She retaliated by shoving the remaining ice creme we couldn't fit in the bowl into his face. I wasn't spared from that assault either, I kept finding sprinkles and almonds in my hair for weeks! It was absolute hell to try to comb Vlad and Maddie's hair, even after they took three showers. We ended up having to cut both a little."

The second picture backed up on that. All three of them were covered in ice creme, syrup and toppings. Vlad's hair stuck up in odd ways, defying gravity like a tree. Gummy worms stuck our from his head, stuck in the desert, one catching a ride on a piece of ice creme that was falling towards his eye. Maddie's was clumped with chocolate and strawberry goop, sprinkles glued to her face with the sweet liquid. Jack was giving a double thumbs up to the camera, a bizarre blend of all of the materials sticking to his face and shoulders. Maddie was trying to not laugh, while Vlad seemed to have been caught mid snicker. The counters and everything around them did not survive the mess untouched, syrupy and creamy hand prints ripping down the ugly yellow paint.

Danny nodded, replying, "I bet mom was upset about that."

"She was fairly chill, actually. Vlad, not so much." Jack explained, turning a page again, "He took a lot of pride in his hair. He wasn't very happy when the bleach and dye we used to make the stripes in our hair for our band lightened the rest of his. I've always wanted to ask him if he was upset when the Proto Portal bleached his hair."

Danny held out a hand, stopping his dad from turning the page, "Jesus Christ is that fire?!" He pointed at one of the picture, gaped at it.

Jack nodded, "Vlad was almost as good as Maddie at causing flammable reactions. The only difference was that his were controlled and intentional. This was one of his class experiments, called the fire vortex. I have no idea what he mixed to make it, but it was awesome."

Fire vortex was right. Vlad stood in the center of a lab room, his gloved hand holding a test tube that was spouting a huge twisting column of fire. Danny knew that Vlad could probably do the same thing now without need for any chemical reactions, due to his heat core, but the fact that Vlad could make something like that in college was impressive. He appeared to be in complete control of the experiment, handling with a grace his parents lacked whenever they worked. His eyes were hard and focus, spiked hair illuminated orange. Several other people were eying the display with worry or awe.

Danny allowed Jack to continue flipping. He caught glaces of several pictures as the pages went by. Jack suddenly stopped and pointed to another picture. Vlad was writing on a blackboard, almost half of it being covered in very scratchy hand writing. He squinted, frowning, as he leaned forward to look closer. Some things he could make out, but others didn't seem to be words, instead just weird series of odd symbols. Equations and small graphs dotted the writing, but nothing seemed linked to the odd writing. He felt his dad chuckle beside him.

"Oh this—this is funny. Vladdy's bilingual, he can speak Russian, and whenever he'd get really angry with us, he'd just stop communicating in English completely. He'd take notes, write down calculations, and transcribe thesisi all in Russian. Neither of us could speak any amount of the language, so it was his little way at getting back at us. Until it would backfire hilariously and he'd get stuck speaking both English and Russian at the same time when he stopped throwing the tantrum. He once turned in an entire essay completely in Russian by accident and he had to spend a couple of hours translating his own paper for the professor. When Mads took this picture, he didn't know he was switching back and forth until he got done and looked it over. His head just fell back and he groaned really loudly when he realized."

"That's Russian?" Danny's brows knit.

"Yep, Cyrillic alphabet and all!"

Danny nodded, muttering, "I didn't know Vlad knew a second language."

Jack continued, pausing every once in a while to make a few sentence remarks on lesser pictures, like pointing out when Vlad was throwing a tantrum, or about Maddie's hairstyle a few of the remarks were humorous, and Danny found himself chuckling at a few of the more outrageous ones. Like one of Vlad's hairstyles, in which the short spikes on the top of his head were pulled into a shot Mohawk while the longer was pulled into a french braid in the back. Jack paused on one page, chuckling. Danny looked at him, confused, and he pointed out the picture that caught his attention. Danny tilted his head at it.

All three of the college trio seemed to be frozen in weird poses. Vlad had his arms above his head, one leg lifted like a flamingo. His hair fanned around his head, a bright white stripe down the middle. Jack had his hands out in front of him, nose crinkled in laughter. Maddie appeared to be pretending to rock out on an invisible guitar. The lime green of her tank top was an odd color Danny wouldn't have been able to picture on his mother. But for the life of him, he couldn't figure out what they were doing.

"What in the world are you doing there?" he asked.

Jack smiled wide, "Dancing! Vlad was an awesome dancer, believe it or not. I didn't know the first thing about dancing. We wanted to go to a club one time, but we kept putting it off because neither me or Maddie could dance. Vlad eventually go tired of the excuse and tried to teach us. I feel on my rear so many times, and he'd just snicker his skinny little ass off. It worked though, He taught me how to dance. Not very good, mind you, but he still did it." he smiled fondly across the room at a picture on a small stand, "There was one dance he taught me and your mother that we did at our wedding..."

Danny fallowed his gaze to the picture of his parents' wedding.

"I wish he could have been there..." Jack said, a forlorn look in his eyes, "Then again, he would have probably been really angry at me. Well, angrier."

"Why do you say that?" Danny asked.

"Because he'd told me that he had a crush of mads. I have no doubts that he would have felt betrayed. Maybe he'd even think that I sabotaged the experiment to get him out of the picture or something, I don't know. Maybe he actually does think that right now. I don't know." Danny shifted a little at the unnatural quietness of his dads voice, uncomfortable with it. Those were tones that didn't belong there, "Either way, he would have been upset. But he was friend, and it would have meant the world if he had been there. Even if only to punch me in the teeth."

Jack gave a small chuckle, but it died when Danny remained silent. He reached beside him, grabbing a different binder.

"Here, lemme show you a few of our best pranks." he said, flipping open 'Awesome Prankitudes', "This one was mine. Vlad had just gotten done with his finals, and he's literally just collapsed into the suite the three of us shared. Just plop, and he was out like a light. This was every single dish we owned, it took me so long to build it around him. A couple times he shifted a little and I thought he was going to bring it down early. But he didn't. The next morning he did when he woke up. The sound of all the pots and pans falling to the tiled floor was only outdone by his screaming and swearing."

Danny's eye widened at the hap hazardous metal pyramid balanced above Vlad's unresponsive form. Jack was crouched next to it, giving a thumbs up and smiling at the camera. Vlad was sprawled out like a lanky bear rug, a bag partially under his back and a few papers around him. Other pictures on the page showed the structure from different angles, and Danny was quite honestly surprised it even stood in the first place. The page flipped, both sides filled with pictures of bright dotted stickers covering nearly every inch of multiple rooms. One was clearly his dads room, given by the fact that there were orange jumpsuits on the floor. Another was his mother's since there was makeup on the desk, on top of ghost and physics books. The third didn't look like a bedroom.

"This was on of his retaliations. This was my room. It was completely covered, myself included, in stickers. This was your mother's room. And this was the main part of the suit. He did all of this in just one night. To this day I haven't figured out how. Prank level Vlad Masters, that is." Jack;s finger moved at he pointed to each of the pictures. The last one showed Vlad smiling while lounging on a couch, a cup of soda in his hand.

He flipped through the other pages, stopping when something white fell out from between two. He picked it up and flipped it over, his face falling as he recognized what it was.

"Oh no, this picture..." he muttered then lowered it, showing Danny. Danny's chest tightened when he recognized the picture too. It was the same one he'd found in Vlad's lab at the reunion, whole and intact, "I remember this one. This was taken during out second year, a couple of weeks before the portal accident. We loved this picture, it was one of the best ones ever taken of us three."

Danny slowly reached out and took the picture from his dads hands, looking over the time frozen faces of all three of them. He'd never really noticed how different younger Vlad was from the current before, even through all those other pictures. But his dad had been right, he looked completely different when he wasn't angry. There was an entirely different air about younger Vlad. It was like seeing the other side of a coin, the yin to the yang, the white versus the black.

"I really miss these days. I wish things could be like this again." Jack muttered suddenly, quietly.

Danny look up at him and found him staring at the picture, "Dad?"

"I know that Vladdy's still really angry with me. That he never really forgave me. I just..." he paused taking a deep breath. Danny could have sworn he heard his dads voice almost crack and it hurt his heart, "I didn't realize how _bad_ it was until I started looking back. I didn't realize how different he's become. How bitter. How _angry_. I really screwed everything up between us..."

Danny shook his head, "None of that's your fault. Vlad's bitterness is his own."

"Oh, but it is. It's all my fault. I was the one who didn't do the calculations right, I was the one who put soda into the filtrator, I was the one who got him trapped in the hospital for so many years. I pushed the buttons. I wasn't there for him when he needed me the most." he paused, taking a breath, "I regret it."

"I regret not being there for him while he was in the hospital, when he was in pain, when he was alone, for every year we didn't talk. I've betrayed him. I've betrayed him so many times, and I don't even know what I can to to try to make it up to him. I've tried, but he's still so angry." Jack shook his head, running his hands through his hair, "I don't know what else to do to."

"I'd do anything, _**anything**_ , to fix things. I'd do anything to have these times back. To have my _**best**_ _**friend**_ again. The one who would joke, and laugh, and dance. The one who would smile."

The raw pain in his dads voice was almost too much for Danny to bear. It hurt him to listen to, it hurt him to know what Vlad really thought of Jack. How Jack wanted nothing more than to try to fix things, compared to how Vlad wanted nothing more than to see Jack burn. Danny didn't even have the heart to be angry at Vlad for making his dad like this, he was just complicated and remorseful. Vlad didn't realize all that he was casting away. Jacks hand snaked around his back and rubbed his shoulder suddenly, and Danny leaned closer into the one armed semi-hug.

"Sorry, Danny, didn't mean to get like that." he said.

"It's okay. I understand. I would feel the same if I ever lost Sam or Tucker in that way." Danny flashed him a smile, and his dad gave one back. He shifted, pulling away and standing from the couch, "Is it okay if I head over to Sam's, by the way?"

Jack nodded, then jabbed a binder at his chest, "Sure, just try to be back before curfew or there's going to be trouble, mister!"

"Got it." Danny nodded, then jogged around the coffee table and out the front door.

One alley way and a ten minute flight late, Danny landed heavily onto the luxurious carpet of the Mayoral house. Toxic green eyes scanned the main hall, but it was empty. He stood from his crouch, taking a few steps forward. He didn't feel Vlad's ectosignature, but that didn't mean anything recently. He'd somehow found the ability to be able to hide it, something Danny was incredibly jealous of given his parent's invention's predilection for target his own. He grumbled, grinding his teeth.

"Hey fruitloop, get your ass out here!" he called, raising his voice loud enough so that it bounced off the walls. He felt the searing familiar heat of Vlad's signature incredibly close by, and he swung around, glaring at the top of the massive curved stairs.

"Language, Daniel, you're fourteen you have no business to be saying such words." Vlad chided, his fingers trailing over the dark wood of the stairs railing. His eyes narrowed, and he raised his chin defiantly, "You _also_ have no business being in my home. Unless, of coarse, you're asking for a fight?"

Danny's eye twitched at the cocky attitude in Vlad's voice. His fingers twitched, but he held in the ectoenergy from forming. Instead, he leapt into the air and bolt up the stairs, landing in front of Vlad. The man took a few steps back, raising his arms in defense. Danny glared, the other halfa eying him. He sighed through his nose and shoved his hand into his pocket, pulling out one of his phones. His hand darted out and grabbed hold of Vlad's wrist before the older halfa could pull away, yanking it back towards him. He shoved the sleek black device into calloused fingers, then shoved the hand back towards Vlad.

"You need to listen to this." Danny said, glaring, " _ **All**_ of it. All twenty eight minutes of it."

Vlad's eyes flickered from Danny's glaring face to the phone in his hand and back. He shot his own glare back, "Why should I?"

"Because you have a lot of thinking you need to do. And then you need to make a choice. I don't really care which way or the other. But you need to know the other side of the story." Danny stated. He turned on his heel, walking down the stairs while Vlad just stared after him. He paused at the bottom, turning a little back but not turning all the way around, "Because honestly? What I just went through was the most depressing thing I've ever had to endure."

Le leapt into the air and shot out of the room, phasing through the wall. Vlad reached towards the retreating teen.

"What do you mean, what happened? Daniel!" he was too late, Danny was already gone. He let his arm drop, swearing, "Blasted child..."

His attention fell onto the phone in his hand. It was cold in his hand, chilled by Danny's unnaturally cold body. His fingertip ghosted over a raised Phantom insignia on the back, and he studied the glowing screen. A large green play button was situated in the center of the screen, a bar below it. The file name was generic, simply being 'sound_5-26-05_000124'. I betrayed nothing about what this could all be about. He didn't understand what he meant, and he didn't know what he was talking about. His thumb hovered over the button, and he hesitated, entirely confused and a little uncomfortable with Daniel's brash behavior. The little circle stared up at him, almost mockingly.

He sighed, and pressed play.

-o-oOo-o-

AN: I just want them to be best friends again -gross sobbing on the floor in a puddle of my own tears-


End file.
